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Documentation Surfaces

github-actions[bot] edited this page Aug 23, 2026 · 1 revision

Documentation Surfaces

An inventory of every place CivicTechWR keeps operating knowledge, as of 2026-08-19.

Surfaces are ordered by how recently something meaningful changed. This is deliberately not the same as GitHub's "last updated" — two repos look active in the org listing but their recent commits are deploy and CI churn, with no content change in eleven months.

Surface Last content change Age State
Discourse (CoLab) 2026-08-15 4 days Current, login-gated
Website 2026-08-17 2 days Current
Google Drive — CivicTechWR Root 2026-05 3 months Archive with one live corner
Blog 2025-09-10 11 months Stale
Org documentation site 2025-09-25 11 months Stale, broken entry point

Discourse — CoLab

discourse.ctwr.org · the de facto operational record

Sixteen categories. The active ones:

  • Organizers Meetings — 17 topics, running through 2026-08-15
  • Recaps — 28 topics, Wednesday hacknight summaries
  • Events — 29 topics, auto-synced from Luma
  • Ideas & Proposals, Ask the Community, Show & Tell, Links, Speakers
  • CivicTechWR Wiki — opened April 2026, one topic

Category structure has drifted from the season model. There are Season 4 Projects and Season 5 Projects categories, but Seasons 6, 7 and 8 never got one — Season 8 planning sits in Internal Staff Discussion. Projects and Older Projects are both empty.

Everything here is behind a login. This is the single most consequential fact about our documentation: the most current knowledge sits on the least visible surface. See Drift-Findings finding 08.


Website — ctwr-web

civictechwr.org · best-maintained surface

Jekyll, with genuinely serious engineering around it: accessibility CI, CodeQL, pa11y, CSP inline linting, a CSS budget validator, Dependabot auto-merge, and a Ruby plugin (_plugins/fetch_luma_event.rb) that pulls the next hacknight live from Luma at build time.

That Luma plugin is the model for everything else. It is the one place where a fact that changes weekly is fetched rather than restated. See Ownership-Model.

Structured content lives in _data/navigation.yml, projects.yml, partners.yml.


Google Drive — CivicTechWR Root

Effectively an archive with one live corner, and nothing says so.

Folder Contents State
Organizing/Season 8/ Intake forms, call for pitches, pitches Current
Organizing/Banking/ Financial records Current (Feb 2026)
Organizing/ (rest) Funding applications, media kit, outreach, sponsorship, past season finales 1/3/4 2024–25
Meeting Notes & Decks/ Presenter decks 2017–2019, one 2024 doc Superseded by Discourse
Past Projects/ FederalVote, HousingHoF, MappingWR, MunicipalVote, Open Data Kitchener, SmartCitiesWR 2018–2020
Photos/ March 2025, with visible duplicates Archive

Drive holds the things that genuinely cannot live in Git — banking, funding applications, signed venue agreements, sponsorship correspondence. That part is worth keeping and is correctly placed. The rest may have been superseded.


Blog

civictechwr.github.io/blog/ · Jekyll, deployed from main in the blog repo

Last published post: Season 5 Finale, 2025-09-10. Since then the org has run Season 6, Season 7 (showcase April 2026), and is now in Season 8 with a showcase on 2026-08-26. None of it is written up.

This is the only public, un-gated narrative surface CivicTechWR has, and it is the one that stopped.

The repo also still carries roughly ten unremoved theme demo posts (old_2020-01-01-french-wine.md, review-oscar, london, post-with-spoiler), and several drafts that were never published.


Org documentation site — CTWR-Organization-Documentation

MkDocs Material, deployed to GitHub Pages. The designated home for policies, guidelines and templates — and it has had zero content commits since 2025-09-25.

What is in it:

  • Policies — Code of Conduct, Diversity & Inclusion, Privacy, Data Deletion
  • Guidelines & Templates — event planning, event roles, seasons, pitching, communications, social media, recaps, demo slides, interview questions, outreach letter, feedback TOS
  • FAQ
  • A second, parallel copy of the blog

Its entry point is broken: docs/index.md is a "Land of the Lost Pages" 404 joke page that was never replaced. The nav entry is commented out with "I dont think we want the index right now as it seems to be the error page," and the repo's homepage field routes around it straight to /FAQ/.


GitHub — 38 repos

Not a documentation surface as such, but it carries real documentation:

  • .github — the org-wide community-health baseline: Code of Conduct, contributing guide, security policy, seven issue templates, CODEOWNERS, gitleaks config. Also holds the June 2026 org audit with open action items.
  • CTWR-Project-Template-New — a genuinely comprehensive starter: 12-week workflow, accessibility guide, impact tracking, user research templates, wiki templates, setup scripts.
  • core — this repo. Now the home of this wiki.

Roughly a dozen live project repos, eight WRvotes repos spanning six election cycles, and eleven archived.

Clone this wiki locally